Are women over-represented in video games?

[DonFerrari]

KLAMarine said:

SpokenTruth said: 

1. Three shots, not dead and you can take cover and heal?  Heal?  How realistic.  Our marines should try that.

2. Sure, fewer weapons but don't you just love a medic running around with a flame thrower or an RPG because they've obviously trained for it, right?

3. Good thing it allows you sprint again almost immediately. Nothing says realism like back to back to back dashes of Usain Bolt speed with just 5 second breathers in between. Or the Airborne division with no spring fatigue at all.

4. And you can immediately sprint away.

5. So you accept a lack of realism for expediency? 

6. So women on the military battlefields are unreal to you but health regeneration, privates with colonel command powers, sprint regeneration, unqualified weapon usage, fly/drive any vehicle, and on and on are realistic?

 

And don't even get me started on perks.  You guys talk about maintaining realism and then play for hours to remove as much realism as possible with perks.

I think a distinction between mechanical realism and aesthetic realism needs to be made here.

Mechanical realism gets breathing room since real life tanks are complex. I'm certain that operating a tank involves more than moving a joystick around.

We can't expect players to have read something like this to operate or repair a tank now can we?

 

Also, regenerating health and such is a matter of expedience; the human body can heal of course but it's much faster in a video game. We can't expect a player to have to spend time in a virtual hospital bed after taking a bullet.

Real life is nothing like Call of Duty World at War but it's understandable why the video game would forego these realistic aspects of war: because they're a pain in the ass to put up with.

Aesthetic realism is different: something like putting African soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army would make no sense nor would it have the excuse of making gameplay expedient. It would simply be historically inaccurate and pull one out of a setting. Just the same, as far as I know, soldiers with prosthetic limbs wouldn't be allowed to fight and very few women actually fought in World War 2.

The setting's aesthetic would be compromised incorporating such things and we all know how reliant people are on their sense of sight.

As a WW2phile, I know for a fact that Soviet women fought for the Red Army and flew missions as well. Would be neat to incorporate these historical facts into a WW2 title but it's undeniable that the front lines of battle in WW2 were largely manned by men in overwhelming numbers.

They could have you respawning bodies. take 3 shots you die and have resume imediately on the body at your side, while having a team size that would count as your life bar (which could regenerate or not with time, like more people unifying your team as you move along). Same with the different "cars" or strategic weapons. But that wouldn't really improve much on gameplay itself.